Amazon.co.uk Review
The evil empire has built a secret droid factory somewhere on the planet Tatooine. They are building an army of assassin droids and unless they are stopped, these dangerous machines will terrorise the galaxy.
Your job is to become a master droid builder by designing and building druids that help you complete important missions. Ultimately you must find the secret location of the assassin factory and reprogram the assassin droids to outsmart the evil empire. But can they cut it?!
Everything you need to construct the perfect droid is in the workshop. You can choose from 87 unique parts and build from a possible 25 million variations. You can even paint them to your own specification. Droids are tested in the training facility where you learn how to overcome obstacles that lie ahead in the perilous 3D environments.
Aimed at anyone from 10 years up, the BAFTA award-winning Star Wars Droidworks is an engrossing and highly entertaining game. It might sound complex but there are four tutorials which clearly show you how to build and operate droids and deploy them on missions. There are easy-to-follow on-screen instructions telling you the speed, how much power you have left and where to exit to the workshops.
The assassin droids are large hunks of moving scrap metal. They are dull-witted and fairly easy to elude. But don't let them get too close--and may the force be with you! --Justin Hunt
It's about time somebody took the latest, coolest videogame technology and made it into something that children can learn from. You start in the Droid Workshop, where you combine up to 88 robotic parts, each with unique characteristics. For example, you can make your droid very strong and heavy, but there's a tradeoff- it will need more batteries. Once you've made your droid, you can take it for a test drive on one of 13 different missions. For example, in Fire When Ready, kids must adjust a giant catapult while accounting for mass and trajectory to hurl their droid across a vast canyon. If the droid is too heavy, it's back to the workshop for some lighter parts. This is no easy mission. It can take up to an hour of playing with batteries, weights and explorations before you experience any degree of success. The scope of this initial challenge frustrated some testers. We agree that there should be an easier early puzzle, or at least a better hint system for when the going gets tough. Parents, be prepared to do some coaching.
They certainly didn't cut any corners in the art department when they designed this program. The rich 3D graphics and fully orchestrated musical scores capture the appeal of the Star Wars movie. The compelling graphics, like those in videogames, are based on LucasArts' Jedi Knight animation engine- the kind used in those amazing flight simulations. Watch out though, as you'll need no less than 81 MB of hard disk space. We were able to make the program run just fine on a two-year-old Pentium 200 with 32 MB of RAM. It ran even better on a first generation iMac.
Teaches: science, energy, simple machines, light, magnetism, programming
Age Range: 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 Copyright © 2000 Children's Software Revue